Woe To The Experts In The Law
WOE TO THE EXPERTS IN THE LAW
LUKE 11:45-54
Jesus didn’t let the lawyers off the hook. They got other people to do difficult things and then wouldn’t offer to help.
The Pharisees were laymen, fanatically preoccupied with details of the Law. The lawyers were professionals, the “scribes,” associated with the Pharisees in their fantastic legalism. It is difficult to draw a sharp line between the two classes. They are linked in condemnation.
11:46 is the core of the charge. The lawyers had made the simple and beneficent Mosaic Law a complicated web of regulation too difficult for ordinary folk to follow. It is always true that any system of interpretation or of teaching which makes religion hard to follow or to comprehend, irrelevant to life, or remote from common experience, is forthwith wrong. But the lawyers had also made it possible for those who knew the way to evade their own burdensome obligations.
Examples may be quoted in multitude from rabbinical literature. The Sabbath day’s journey is an illustration. It was limited to about 1,000 yards. This was of little use, but one could extend the distance by pushing out the limits of one’s legal home. A rope across the end of one’s street, no doubt briefly put in place, constituted the whole enclosure of one’s “home.” The “journey” could begin at that point. Or if greater licence still were needed, a parcel of food, concealed or placed, on Friday, at the end of the prescribed distance, constituted a second “home.” One could begin again, and proceed for another Sabbath day’s journey.
It is easy to see how a personality thus preoccupied would become utterly corrupt. The spirit of man cannot endure, undamaged, hypocrisies like these. Hence the attitude which the Lord condemned. They honored the tombs of the prophets who had denounced spiritless legalism (Isaiah 1:11-15), but their forbears had persecuted the same prophets, and they themselves were unable to recognize One greater than all the saints of old. Consider John 3:17-21 as a commentary on all this.
Notes 11:47: dead saints are always more popular than living ones. 11:49: “wisdom of God”—cf. Matthew 23:34. 11:50: “shed”—“being constantly poured out.” 11:51: these incidents span the whole of Old Testament history. 11:52: a key was the law-teacher’s badge of office, his work being to open the Scriptures to others—see Isaiah 22:22. 11:53: note the forceful language.